Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/22

20 that the Ictis of Diodorus is the same island which, on the authority of the old Greek historian, Timaeus, is mentioned by Pliny under the name of Mictis, and stated to lie six days' sail inward (introrsus) from Britain (which length of navigation, however, the Britons accomplished in their wicker boats), and to be that in which the tin was produced. It must no doubt have taken fully the space of time here mentioned to get to the Scilly Isles from the more distant parts even of the south coast of Britain.

Diodorus goes on to inform us that the foreign merchants, after having purchased the tin at the Isle of Ictis, and conveyed it across the sea to the opposite coast of Gaul, were then wont to send it overland to the mouth of the Rhone, an operation which consumed thirty days. At the mouth of the Rhone it was no doubt purchased by the merchants of Marseilles, and at a later period also by their rivals of Narbonne, if we are not rather to suppose that the Gallic traders who brought it from Britain were merely their agents. Cæsar, however, expressly informs us that the Veneti, who occupied a part of the present Bretagne, had many ships of their own, in which they were accustomed to make voyages to Britain. From the two great emporia in the south of France the commodity was diffused over all other parts of the earth, as it had been at an earlier period from Cadiz and the other Phœnician colonies on the south coast of Spain.

It appears from Strabo, however, that the operose and tedious mode of conveyance by land carriage from the coast of Brittany to the gulf of Lyons was eventually abandoned for other routes, in which some advantage could be taken of the natural means of transportation afforded by the country. By one of these, the British goods being brought to the mouth of the Seine, in Normandy, were sent up that river as far as it was navigable, and then, being carried on horses a short distance overland, were transmitted for the remainder of the way down the Rhone, and afterwards along the coast to Narbonne and Marseilles. It is probable enough